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| What would you think if you entrusted your home to the care of someone while you were away, only to return and find it looking like this? |
Imagine you’re going away for a couple of weeks and have
found a family recommended to house-sit while you’re gone. Being very particular
about how things are done, you compile a notebook with guidelines about what to
do in your absence.
You provide instructions about bringing in the morning
paper; what day the trash is collected; how often to water the plants, feed the
fish and walk the dog; where you store the vacuum cleaner; how to shut off your
quirky kitchen faucet so it doesn’t leak continually, and other details.
On the day of your departure, the family arrives and you
start going over the notes with them page by page. Then the husband, Jason,
says, “Hey, don’t worry. We’ve got this. I’m sure your notes tell us everything
we need to know. Just relax and enjoy your cruise. Have a great time. We’ll see
you when you get back.”
Confident of leaving your home in good hands, you embark on the
trip, which exceeds your expectations. Two weeks later, filled with happy
memories, you return home and find…the biggest mess you’ve ever seen.
Newspapers, still in protective plastic wrappers, lie strewn
across your front yard, yellowing under the sun’s relentless glare. The garbage
can remains standing by your back door, but now it’s overflowing with the
accumulation of two weeks’ trash.
Warily you enter the house and the first thing you see is
fish, floating upside-down, all dead. Then you notice the smell – deposits left
by your dog because the house sitters had failed to take her out more than once
a day. The plants are all wilted beyond recovery, and the kitchen faucet isn’t
just leaking – there’s a steady stream of water into the sink that, because the
stopper wasn’t removed, now overflows onto your hardwood floor.
Aghast at the scene, you want to scream, “What the…!” just
as your guests enter the room. “Welcome back! Did you have a nice time?” they
ask with broad smiles, oblivious to the chaos surrounding them.
“We did – until we got home!” is all you can manage,
flustered beyond words. You gather yourself and then ask, “Didn’t you read the
notebook? We told you exactly what you needed to do, and you assured us it
would tell you everything you needed to know. What happened?”
“Yes, the notebook did tell us everything we need to know,”
replies the wife, Ashley. “We read it every night. In fact, you did such a good
job – very well written, by the way – we even studied it several mornings as
well. You were extremely thorough. You thought of everything. We even told our
friends about it!”
How would you respond to that? Besides trying to avoid
assault and battery charges?
As strange as that scenario seems, it’s being replicated
every day in homes across America and around the world. The best-selling book
in the world, the Bible, is read by millions of people daily but, like the
away-from-home notebook described above, it’s often either ignored, or used only
for information, not for application.
The Scriptures clearly were not intended merely for storing
in our intellectual filing cabinets. In Psalm 119:9,11 King David declared, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By
living according to your word…. I have hidden your word in my heart that I
might not sin against you.” From the Middle Eastern mindset, in which this
was written, to believe also requires to act accordingly. There wasn’t room for
the believe-but-don’t-do kind of attitude that characterizes much of Western
thinking.
And in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, the apostle Paul insisted the
teachings of the Bible are more than a compilation of suggestions, or even
recommendations: “All Scripture is
God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good
work.”
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